Friday, December 31, 2010

The Democrats Hate Democracy

Exhibit A, courtesy of Charles Krauthammer:

A month ago, Medicare issued a regulation providing for end-of-life counseling during annual “wellness” visits. It was all nicely buried amid the simultaneous release of hundreds of new Medicare rules.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D.,Ore.), author of Section 1233, was delighted. “Mr. Blumenauer’s office celebrated ‘a quiet victory,’ but urged supporters not to crow about it,” reports the New York Times. Deathly quiet. In early November, his office sent an e-mail plea to supporters: “We would ask that you not broadcast this accomplishment out to any of your lists . . . e-mails can too easily be forwarded.” They had been lucky that “thus far, it seems that no press or blogs have discovered it. . . . The longer this regulation goes unnoticed, the better our chances of keeping it.”

So much for Democratic transparency — and for their repeated claim that the more people learn what is in the health-care law, the more they will like it. Turns out ignorance is the Democrats’ best hope.

And regulation is their perfect vehicle — so much quieter than legislation. Consider two other regulatory usurpations in just the last few days.

On December 23, the Interior Department issued Secretarial Order 3310, reversing a 2003 decision and giving itself the authority to designate public lands as “Wild Lands.” A clever twofer: (1) a bureaucratic power-grab — for seven years up through December 22, wilderness-designation had been the exclusive province of Congress, and (2) a leftward lurch — more land to be “protected” from such nefarious uses as domestic-oil exploration in a country disastrously dependent on foreign sources.

The very same day, the president’s Environmental Protection Agency declared that in 2011 it would begin drawing up anti-carbon regulations on oil refineries and power plants, another power grab effectively enacting what Congress had firmly rejected when presented as cap-and-trade legislation.

For an Obama bureaucrat, however, the will of Congress is a mere speed bump. Hence this regulatory trifecta, each one moving smartly left — and nicely clarifying what the spirit of bipartisan compromise that President Obama heralded in his post-lame-duck December 22 news conference was really about: a shift to the center for public consumption and political appearance only.

3 comments:

The masses are too stupid to govern themselves. It is incumbent upon the intellectuals to save the unwashed from themselves. Why without the elite, the uneducated and under-privileged (those without the superior intellect) would surely perish. Is it not better to have their betters take care of them....until they become a burden on the betters, then...Death Panels.

Unelected (but not unaccountable) bureaucrats have always issued regulations; it's called public administration and it's the process by which real government work gets done. If we relied solely on elected officials, the government would never actually do anything. Congress created these agencies for a reason and they also write legislation that requires public administrators to interpret and carry out very vague objectives. Since when did civil servants become the bad guy?

Civil servants are the bad guys when they're circumventing democracy and the Constitution. Public administration has most certainly not "always" worked this way; try telling the Founders that legislatures should pass "very vague objectives," and they'd have slapped you down so fast it'd make your head spin.

Why shouldn't we the people be the ones to decide which lands are off-limits to the private sector and which aren't? What regulations oil refineries and power plants should be subjected to? What programs deserve our tax dollars?

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"Nearby I see others who, in the name of progress, striving to make man into matter, want to find the useful without occupying themselves with the just, to find science far from beliefs, and well-being separated from virtue: these persons are said to be the champions of modern civilization, and they insolently put themselves at its head, usurping a place that has been abandoned to them, but from which they are held off by their unworthiness." - Alexis de Tocqueville